Ann Romney’s View

“Explain that to me,” Barbara Walters said to Ann Romney, who had just said something that has needed a bit of explaining, about her husband’s changing position on abortion at the stage in his career when Massachusetts voters mattered—and also about why, in her view, people should stop asking. “The good news is, I’m not running for office and I don’t have to say what I feel! But I am pro-life. I’m happy to say that. Mitt has always been a pro-life person. He governed, when he ran, as, um, pro-choice.” It was, she said, “a tender, tender issue”—but not that this was anything to vote about:

Women are going to have a choice. I mean, it’s clear. If you really want to make a choice and if those choices are about reproductive rights, that’s your choice. If they’re about economic issues and making a better future for your children and making sure that we have this—and that’s the beauty of what we have in this country, is being able to have those choices.

It is hard to say which is more glaring here, the evasiveness, or the dismissiveness. Ann Romney is saying that if you care—and vote—about reproductive rights, then you don’t care about “a better future for your children” (and one might in fact think that Obama is better on the economy). Does that include daughters whose lives might be constrained, or whose health might be threatened? When Joy Behar asked Ann if reproductive health might also be an economic issue, she reverted to the stance of the wife who doesn’t have to say: “You know, again, I would love it if you’d get my husband on the couch, Joy.” That might be useful. (He was supposed to be there, but had cancelled.) Mitt Romney’s position is that abortion should not be allowed except in cases of rape or incest (and how would a woman or girl be asked to prove that?), or if the mother would actually die. More remarkably, he has been trying to present that as a non-extreme position because it includes a few exceptions.

But at another moment Ann Romney’s restraint, it has to be said, served her well. There have been a lot of missed chances in this campaign, and one was for Americans to learn more about Mormonism, a faith whose history is wrapped up, in a way few others are, with that of this country. That hasn’t happened—something Whoopi Goldberg made painfully clear, in an exchange in which she seemed to have mistaken Mormon for some sort of mountain-state version of Quakers:

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: As First Lady, if you get the job, it’s going to entail a lot of things, and one of those things is going to be talking to the mothers whose children are coming home in bags, you know, from wars. Now, I know—I believe that your religion doesn’t allow you to go fight.

ANN ROMNEY: No, that’s not correct. We have many, many members of our faith that are serving in armed services.

Goldberg, need it be said, was flatly wrong, and probably owed Romney an apology. Couldn’t someone have looked that up before the show? There are plenty of questions one can ask about Mormonism—and can do so reasonably, given how large a part the faith plays both in the Romneys’ private life and in what they have offered as their community commitments—including hard questions about race. But at least check the basic facts first. The clumsiness also meant that the other question Goldberg wanted to ask—about the Vietnam deferrals Romney got thanks to his mission and student status—got scrambled:

GOLDBERG: O.K., um, I say that because when I read about your husband, what I had read, and maybe you can correct this, is that the reason that he didn’t serve in Vietnam was because it was against the religion. That’s what I read.

ROMNEY: No, that’s not correct. He was serving his mission and you know my five sons have also served missions. None served in the military. None served in the military, but I do have one son that feels that he’s giving back to his country in a significant way where he is now a doctor and he is taking care of veterans.

And so the issue switched from the reasons why her husband had served less than others in his generation—even as he criticized anti-war protesters—to the notion that her sons had done more than other members of theirs.

One of those sons, Josh, was in the audience. Earlier, his older brother Tagg had been asked on a radio program how it felt to hear the President “call your dad a liar”: ”Well, jump out of your seat and you want to rush down to the stage and take a swing at him. But you know you can’t do that because, well, first because there’s a lot of Secret Service between you and him, but also because this is the nature of the process.” (Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about why this wasn’t all that funny.) ”That brother has slugged me a couple of times,” Josh said. “I’m sure President Obama has nothing to worry about.” Romney humor.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.